On 5-aug-04, at 15:21, Michael Richardson wrote:
Iljitsch> The fact that people want to attend a
Iljitsch> session makes it highly unlikely that such a session is so
Iljitsch> unproductive that scrapping it alltoghether would be
Iljitsch> better. (I don't believe IETFers are so stupid they keep
Iljitsch> showing up for unproductive sessions.)
I can think of a number of BOFs, and even some WGs that are very well attended, but have not made any progress.
The trouble is, that even if you can define success fully (which is difficult enough in its own right), that still makes it very hard to impossible to determine which efforts are going to turn out successful a) beforehand and b) somewhere along the way.
My original contention was that these groups are either stuck
Yes. Unfortunately the IETF doesn't seem to have any way to arrive at decisions other than wait, wait some more and until at some point rough consensus happens. The whole IPv6 resolver issue in dnsop is a good example of this problem.
Yet, to make the decision they need to progress, they really need three days of intensive time, and they probably need to have a smaller (more manageable) group attending.
I don't see how sitting in a room for three days is going to achieve something that doing the same for a shorter time + offline preparation can't.
Finally, as has been discussed previously (particularly during our peak, when we didn't fit in the hotels anymore), with wireless, people can occupy seats and not pay attention.
I have some pictures of people playing games on their laptops which prove that it's not the fault of the wireless network. :-)
Much of what happens in sessions is very uninteresting, either for the people who've read the drafts OR the people who haven't. (Hopefully not both...)
Personally, I would be much happier to keep all the nasty details on the mailing lists and use the meeting sessions to talk about what the wg is doing for a larger audience. That would probably lead to good feedback from people who aren't on the wg mailinglist.
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